Genealogy is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives. The field of family history is broader than genealogy, and covers not just lineage but also family and community history and biography.
A family tree, also called a genealogy or a pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. More detailed family trees, used in medicine and social work, are known as genograms.
Melungeons are an ethnicity from the Southeastern United States who descend from Europeans, Native American, and sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as indentured servants and later as slaves. This "race-mixing in the U.S. [wasn't] a new phenomenon". Historically, the Melungeons were associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations who claim to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200.
The one-drop rule is a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
Genetic genealogy is the use of genealogical DNA tests, i.e., DNA profiling and DNA testing, in combination with traditional genealogical methods, to infer genetic relationships between individuals. This application of genetics came to be used by family historians in the 21st century, as DNA tests became affordable. The tests have been promoted by amateur groups, such as surname study groups or regional genealogical groups, as well as research projects such as the Genographic Project.
Blood quantum laws or Indian blood laws are laws in the United States that define Native American status by fractions of Native American ancestry. These laws were enacted by the federal government and state governments as a way to establish legally defined racial population groups. By contrast, many tribes do not include blood quantum as part of their own enrollment criteria.
A genealogical DNA test is a DNA-based test used in genetic genealogy that looks at specific locations of a person's genome in order to find or verify ancestral genealogical relationships, or to estimate the ethnic mixture of an individual. Since different testing companies use different ethnic reference groups and different matching algorithms, ethnicity estimates for an individual vary between tests, sometimes dramatically.
The Black Seminoles, or Afro-Seminoles are Native American-Africans associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Africans, and escaped slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having very dark or brown skin and kinky hair, they all have been categorized as slaves or freedmen.
Black Indians are Native American people – defined as Native American due to being affiliated with Native American communities and being culturally Native American – who also have significant African American heritage.
The Cherokee Freedmen controversy was a political and tribal dispute between the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen regarding the issue of tribal membership. The controversy had resulted in several legal proceedings between the two parties from the late 20th century to August 2017.
A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, enslaved people were freed by manumission, emancipation, or self-purchase. A fugitive slave is a person who escaped enslavement by fleeing.
The Choctaw freedmen are former enslaved African Americans who were emancipated and granted citizenship in the Choctaw Nation after the Civil War, according to the tribe's new peace treaty with the United States. The term also applies to their contemporary descendants.
Edward Ball is an American author who has written multiple works on topics such as history and biography. He is best known for works that explore the complex past of his family, these family members were major rice planters and slaveholders in South Carolina for nearly 300 years. One of his more well known works is based around an African-American family, descended from one member of this family and an enslaved woman, whose members became successful artists and musicians in the Jazz Age.
Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, born October 9, is an American genealogist, author, and speaker. She is also a consultant for the FBI and NCIS.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 African Americans during his adult life. Jefferson freed two of his slaves while he lived. Five others were freed after his death, two of whom were his children through his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. His other two children with Sally Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. The rest of the slaves he owned at the time of his death were sold to pay the debts of his estate. Privately, one of Jefferson's rationales for not freeing more of his slaves was his considerable debt, while his more public justification, expressed in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was his fear that freeing slaves into existing American society would cause civil unrest between prejudiced white planters and vindictive freed slaves.
The western part of Virginia which became West Virginia was settled in two directions, north to south from Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey and from east to west from eastern Virginia and North Carolina. The earliest arrival of enslaved people was in the counties of the Shenandoah Valley, where prominent Virginia families built houses and plantations. The earliest recorded slave presence was about 1748 in Hampshire County on the estate of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, which included 150 enslaved people. By the early 19th century, slavery had spread to the Ohio River up to the northern panhandle.
Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a documentary television series hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that premiered on March 25, 2012, on PBS. In each episode, celebrities are presented with a "book of life" that is compiled with information researched by professional genealogists that allows them to view their ancestral histories, learn about familial connections and discover secrets about their lineage.
John Punch was an enslaved African who lived in the colony of Virginia. Thought to have been an indentured servant, Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life. Two European men who ran away with him received a lighter sentence of extended indentured servitude. For this reason, some historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.
Cherokee descent, "being of Cherokee descent", or "being a Cherokee descendant" are all terms for individuals who have some degree of documented Cherokee ancestry but do not meet the criteria for tribal citizenship. The terms are also used by individuals who self-identify as Cherokee but without either documentation or community recognition.
Marriage of enslaved people in the United States was generally not legal prior to the Civil War (1861–1865). Enslaved African Americans were considered chattel legally, and they were denied human or civil rights until slavery was abolished after the Civil War and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people.
